Tuesday, 24 June 2014

In his autobiography, Out of My Comfort Zone, Steve Waugh wrote
that “fielding is a true test of players sacrificing themselves for the
interest of the team because it’s the only facet of the game where you don’t
get statistically rewarded for your efforts”. True enough, you might reason, but
for how much longer?

In recent columns for
ESPNcricinfo, both Daryll
Cullinan and Rob Steen
argued for a thorough overhaul and renovation of fielding statistics, with
the former concluding, in almost antithetical fashion to Waugh, that “it can no
longer be ignored that fielding needs a massive statistical boost. If fielding
stats are brought in, cricketers will also attach far greater importance to the
discipline because of the recognition rewards”.

It is undeniable that
Cullinan’s viewpoint represents the way the world, let alone cricket, is going – abstract
quantitative measurement is the fundamental reality of a society geared toward
profit, and managerialist performance targets have insinuated themselves into
all spheres of modern life, from school grades to hospital waiting times, with
systems often creeking under the strain of meeting prescriptive and externally
imposed ‘efficiency’ goals. While batting and bowling are readily given
individualised statistics, is this inevitable, necessary or even desirable when
it comes to fielding, the one area of the game that isn’t an isolated individual
undertaking?

Perhaps, rather than being a simple
matter of right and wrong, there is an ‘ideological’ divergence here. Waugh’s
position represents a sort of collectivist, socialist view, along the lines of Karl
Marx’s dictum: “from each according to his capability, to each according to his
needs”. Cullinan’s view might be called ‘liberal individualist’, assuming – in
line with the view that ‘rational self-interest’ provides the ‘hidden hand’ bringing
macro-order to a market-based society – that individual reward is the only way
to incentivise the raising of standards. “Batting and bowling have individual
rankings,” he muses, “why can’t fielding have the same? The game and spectator
experience can only be enhanced”. Only?

Quite apart from this being an
awfully pessimistic take on human motivation, it should be pointed out that the
great recent fielding innovations – the relay chase, the relay throw, the rugby-style
slide-and-offload, the two-man catch – have already happened without individual
incentives, through players exploring their own limits for the service of the
team. As we shall shortly see, it’s not only that “recognition rewards” haven’t proven necessary to
raise standards, therefore; it’s that they can easily interfere with a team’s needs –
creating a conflict between team and individual goals – and thus insidiously affect
good fielding.

Although a much more holistic
team undertaking than cricket (“the team sport played by individuals”), football has nonetheless recently seen an
upsurge in statistical data. Companies like OPTA measure all sorts of
supposedly individual contributions to the collective cause – tackles made, number
of key passes, shooting accuracy – these ‘facts’ being extrapolated from their multi-sided
context and endowed with dubious significance, as with a concert review
that praises the crispness of the cymbal striking without reference to the
overall sound. Is a high number of tackles a sign of diligence, physical flexibility, or colleagues' profligacy in possession?

Aside from effacing the complex causes behind those facets of the game
upon which it purportedly casts light, the statistical approach may, through a
cockeyed focus on product (‘metric’) rather than process (‘good football’), start
to create ‘feedback’. A data analyst tells the head coach, “we need to up our key passes by 23% to give us a
statistically more probable chance to win the remaining games”, leading to
poor decision-making on the ball. Meanwhile, a striker starts to aim down the middle in
order to increase this shooting accuracy figure, despite doing so giving him a
statistically smaller chance of scoring than would aiming for the corners and
missing a higher proportion of his shots. In short, means (shooting accuracy) become
ends, much as Max Weber predicted of the ‘Rational-Bureaucratic Society’.

It’s not hard to imagine a
similar form of feedback affecting the decision-making of fielders in cricket. Already, as a direct
result of statistical measures extrapolated from context (i.e. whether they aid
winning), both batting and bowling possess such conflicts of interest between
team and individual goals – commonly known as ‘red-inking’ and ‘pole-hunting’.

As for fielding, such
performance metrics could easily interfere with the split-second
decision-making that connects fielder and midfielder’s modus operandi. That
selfless dive for the ball that you have 5% chance of stopping, yet know that
the act of diving itself delays and thus prevents the run (cricket’s equivalent
of football’s off-the-ball run), may increasingly – though subtly, and perhaps
subconsciously (learned behaviour always eventually becomes automatic) – be
seen as a risk of a ‘bad mark’ and could inhibit people taking on the improbable
and unlikely. (This highlights the paradoxical notion that better fielders may
have worse stats because, in attempting more ambitious plays, they make more
errors. It also therefore highlights the difficulty of objectively determining
what constitutes errors, fumbles and suchlike.) Steen quotes the philosophy
of Mumbai Indians’ fielding coach, Jonty Rhodes: “I am not marking them on the
balls that were dropped or the balls that were missed. I am watching for the
balls that they haven’t made an effort for”.

Yet there is also a ‘selfish’ dive,
when you have zero percent chance both of stopping the ball and preventing the run (although a
higher chance of injury), yet are keen to
be seen to be doing the right thing, much as with a set batsman who goes
for an unnecessarily aggressive option in a stuttering run-chase in order to
‘show’ how selfless he is, when in fact he’d have best served the team’s
interests by toughing it out.

Of course, whether or not
this transpires would depend, to a certain extent, on what’s at stake: are
performance metrics are a mere TV gimmick or might they be factored into
decisions about your place in the team or even your next contract? Responsibility
for performance is desirable, but as soon as you start to measure individualised
contributions to a collaborative undertaking – a sort of sporting version of ‘Taylorism’, the scientific management of labour – and use those
measurements to evaluate players, then you are introducing intra-team competition where co-operation should prevail.

Indeed, Taylorism used
micro-level rivalry to undermine worker solidarity, and fielding metrics will no
doubt breed a similar insularity: “I’ve done my bit; spreadsheet says so”. The
effect is corrosive. Cullinan proposes measuring fumbles, but you’d soon have
fielders angling to get themselves to flatter parts of the outfield: “Skipper,
I’ll do third man. I don’t mind, honestly…” It is counter-productive. Striving
for a collective exhibition is
replaced by personal inhibition.

Steen signs off by saying
it’s “not about naming and shaming, but acclaiming”, yet the same issues arise even
with an ostensibly positive skill like direct hits. There’s already a vast spectrum
of difficulty here – factoring in angle to the target and the body position
that time affords the fielder – and great cognitive skill in that split-second,
death-overs risk/reward calculation of whether a shy at the stumps is
worthwhile, depending on the danger a batsman poses (either how set he is, or
potential destructiveness). Surely, you don’t want players subconsciously incentivised
into ponderousness and deliberation.

Yet the fundamental problem
with individualised fielding stats is that the game of cricket – all team sport
– is about intangible, unquantifiable relations and human traits, chief among which
is generosity. Looking out for your mates. Putting everything you have in the
pot before you measure it, which is
the true meaning of “from each according to his capabilities…” A team will
appreciate an awkward fielder’s commitment and budget for his shortcomings, whereas
proposals like those of Cullinan sketches out for the same fielder a pre-emptively defensive mindset:
“Well, this is what I contributed. I did my bit”.

Generosity of spirit is
manifested in myriad ways: helping a bowler through a tough period with the
ball; staying upbeat at 450 for 3; supporting a skipper who’s just dropped two
catches; not reacting histrionically when dismissed by a ball that misbehaves out
of the desire for everyone to understand that you’ve been unlucky. These are
all ‘jobs’ that need doing, that are largely unseen and certainly elude
quantification – “affective labour”, as it’s sometimes called, like
child-rearing – but that may translate to runs, wickets and victories further
down the line. Not everything valuable can be measured.

It’s easy to see from other
walks of life how, by submitting fielding to the harsh and not fully
illuminating spotlight of individualised metrics (thus compounding the
intrinsic loneliness of batting and bowling), the engendering of greater insularity
and ‘rational self-interest’ – particularly as T20 itinerancy and freelancing
erode the team cultures forged through hours of what Ed Smith calls the “small
acts of kindness” – all that may also contribute to the growing list of cricketers afflicted
by mental health problems. Stress is our modern illness – along with
corruption, the predominant cricketing narrative of the age, an age of swelling
backroom teams, micromanagement, and ‘soft’ surveillance – and it’s illogical
to bemoan the increasing psychological strain that players find themselves at
the same time as advocating having their every fielding move computed.

All cricketers know that
winning a tight game in the field together is the ultimate. It provides that fleeting
communion – not illusory, despite what Steve Archibald said, even if
fluctuating – and liberating ego-loss so often denied by our human condition:
individual bodies, interior voice, internalised worries. The selfless, ‘swarm’
activity of fielding offers an escape from that, promising the joy of
collective achievement beyond measure. Nothing would burst that bubble – fray
that social fabric – faster than a fielding spreadsheet.